World's largest bee ‘rediscovered’ after 38 years | Hacker News Reader

World's largest bee ‘rediscovered’ after 38 years

nhm.ac.uk

130 pointssohkamyung42 comments

Alfred Russell Wallace, the namesake of this bee, was a very interesting character and largely forgotten next to Charles Darwin. There's a rather great documentary with comedian/naturalist Bill Bailey that I would recommend watching if you're interested in this area of the world and Wallace's history: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2968430/

Specimens sold to collectors for several thousand pounds, don't think they're going to survive long unless some enterprising "poacher" breeds them.

I wouldn't bet on a thick order book.

The first one sold for 7,000 pounds; the second one sold for 3,200. Continuing that trend would mean an infinite number of bees would sell for less than 14,000 pounds total.

There just aren't that many rich bee collectors.

Well let's say there's one hive, would someone sell 7000 bees -- the price floor appears to be £6-8 (based on pinned stag beetle price on eBay).

So, I reckon someone could get a minimum of £7k for collecting the hive. No need to collect infinite bees!

Absolutely wrong. The fact that stag beetles never trade below 6 pounds on eBay does not indicate that you can sell as many as you want at that price. It indicates that nobody finds it worth their time to make sales at a lower price. How many of those sales actually occur in, say, a 12-month window?

If you have 7,000 dead bees, you can try to sell them for 1 pound each, but you'll quickly run through everyone who wants one and be stuck with a bunch of leftover bees.

> Wallace's giant bee (Megachile pluto), which can reach four times the size of a honeybee

Something is weird. They head the article with a big image captioned "Wallace's giant bee in comparison with a honeybee"; it shows the honeybee as being much less than a quarter the size of the giant bee.

It seems they have used some small honey bee. You can see on the other pics that the size comparison would be alrighty.

It looks about 4 times its length.

By that argument, the White House is 90% of the size of the Empire State Building.

Think thats a pretty typical way of describing animals though, by a single dimension, rather than volume. If the ESB and WH were animals you'd naturally compare heights rather than widths.

It's very interesting how this bee relies on termite mounds to live in and specific kinds of tree resin to build termite free sections. Since there's a finite number of termite mounds on the couple islands it lives on there's not many of these bees in the world, nor will there ever be. Also interesting that the bees, being near extinct, are worth a lot of money to collectors at auctions, and that the people who live on this island have very few sources of outside income.

Thanks, I hate it. :)

Don't worry, we will soon have it killed off along with the rest of the insects.

Do you really think we can create a greater extinction event than the ones the insects have survived? And yes, that includes some serious climate changes.

All-out nuclear war?

This used to worry me too, but I read this article [1] and it cheered me up! Sure, most of civilisation would likely crumble if centres of production and distribution were nuked and vast tracts of the world would be irradiated, but it's by no means an ELE.

1: https://www.quora.com/In-a-total-nuclear-exchange-where-the-...

The impact which ended the era of the dinosaurs had an estimated energy greater than all the nuclear weapons in the world. Granted, it was concentrated in one area. But the result was thought to have effected the entire planet, with the sun being blocked out for several years, resulting in the collapse of plant life and drop in temperatures. The forests around the world may have also ignited after ejecta from the impact fell back to earth, temporarily superheating the atmosphere.

A nuclear war can only be fought to the point where nobody has the capacity to keep fighting. You can't actually obliterate the planet. The global climate would be altered but it wouldn't be close to the worst the earth has seen. Insects, plants, rodents, and humans will all almost certainly survive a nuclear war. Animals in the wild are largely unaffected by high levels of background radiation because they don't live long enough for that to be what kills them and they reproduce before that anyway.

Nuclear war would suck for people but life on earth and a lot of the life on it would be just fine.

AI could keep fighting, and replicating more weapons, long after humans are dead.

You mean futuristic AI, like Skynet?

I remember reading that some insects are more tolerant of radiation compared to humans.

Buzzkill

You hate the rediscovery or the bee?

What is it about this particular environment that allows this mutation (i.e., larger in size) to survive here, but no where else in the world?

Also, in theory, could it be even larger, or is there some limit to how large a bee could be?

Insect size tends to be limited by oxygen availabiltiy (since they don't have lungs, and must absorb oxygen passively). Hence why the biggest insects are found in oxygen rich rainforests.

I know insects used to be much bigger when the atmosphere had more oxygen.

But I'm very skeptical that there is more oxygen in rain forests. For one thing, I don't think they actually produce more oxygen than they consume, since there is an equilibrium of plant mass being created and being consumed. Also, the planet is quite windy.

Still, I'm interested in seeing any evidence to the contrary!

Oh, Is the damned planet earth. Is doing this things everywhere since millions of years. Bigger, faster and with more teeth.

There is a limit to how large an insect can be. Couldn't breath effectively with the body mass of a retriever (fortunately).

I remember reading somewhere that sometime in the prehistoric era when earth was more oxygen rich, giant insects were abound.

https://earthsky.org/earth/why-were-prehistoric-insects-so-h...

What vertline3 said. This would appear to be island gigantism. An island is small and not well connected to the rest of the world, so the organisms that do happen to be there often adapt into different niches than their mainland origin species, since whatever would normally fill that niche isn't around.

Maybe related to Island Giganticism, and also Island Dwarfism (foster's rule).

Alternate title: "Bee finally declared winner of world's longest running game of hide and seek!"

"38 year old bee loses game of hide and seek"

Here in Northern California there’s Carpenter bees that big. I see them all the time...

I've seen carpenter bees in California as big as that.

it would probably hurt like hell to be stung by it

And its size is comparable to a domestic pussycat.

Ohhh, you haven't seen nothing until you've seen the Asian giant hornet. Nearly two inches long, with a quarter-inch-long stinger that's gauranteed to cause immense pain, and may kill you even if you're not allergic. These insects are as vicious as they are huge. If just one invades a honeybee hive, it turns the hive into an insect-scale scene from Attack on Titan, forcing its way in through the entrance, slaughtering bees left and right with one snip from its mandibles. European honeybees have no defense, but Japanese honeybees can defeat a single hornet by surrounding it with a ball of bees which vibrate their wings until the hornet overheats and dies -- and even then many bees inside the ball will be lost. If the single scout hornet makes it out alive, it will return -- with friends. Even a hive of tens of thousands of bees cannot mount an effective defense against just a few hornets, and the hornets will lay waste to the colony in a matter of hours.

Nature is a merciless bitch, and some of her creatures are downright horrifying.

This video amazed me when I first saw it. (I hope there’s a better quality one out there)

https://youtu.be/JDSf3Kshq1M

It’s just amazing how much stronger the hornets are.

I fully expected this to be a resident of The Land of Misfit Animals, AKA Australia.

Quite surprised it's not. Indonesia is close enough that it might have escaped it's confines, though.

Where was he hiding?

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